FAKE WEED FOR SALE (THE GREAT HOAX)

Featured • March 6, 2019

by William Gutenberg

Contributing Writer

Featured

March 6, 2019

Imagine if there were a new species of weed that got you high but the plant itself didn’t look anything like a weed plant. You could grow it in your front yard and no one would suspect you were growing cannabis. You could grow it on the Whitehouse lawn and the worst that would happen is their gardeners would remove it thinking it was a weed (pun intended).

Think of the money a person or an organization could make planting this new species all over the planet. The fear of getting busted would be near nil. Seeds for this plant would be worth so much money. Like $2000 a seed… At least that’s what people were offering when a bunch of stories on the discovery of a new non-weed weed strain was released back in 2015.

High Times and a few other weed blogs reported this story all at the same time. But then, it was discovered it was a hoax…

The high tech troll, Reactor, created an elaborate scenario with a fake website and a post on Reddit. Making it all look mostly legit was part of his genius.

By writing a fake story and then purchasing a URL (web address) and then making a sub-domain for that address that included the name of a real news site while also copying the code from the real news site in question, he was able to make the story seem 100% legit. Except to one or two Redditors who were able to spot the abnormal URL address.

The editors at High Times missed the discrepancy too so they copied the fake news story and had everyone thinking the weed world was about to totally change. Once it became clear the internet was getting trolled, most of the sites took down their stories or declared the whole thing a hoax.

fake weed for sale

Can’t really blame these sites for getting caught with their pants around their ankles. I mean, it’s ridiculous, but I’ve got so much respect for a master troll effort. With this said, High Times is supposed to be the gold standard of cannabis journalism yet they even jumped the gun and got led into a fool ambush. May as well have published an ad that read fake weed for sale.

There is one site however that just kept up the story without admitting to be wrong…